


The Anatomical Difference

by lettered



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: F/M, Genderbending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-01-28
Updated: 2011-01-28
Packaged: 2017-10-15 03:53:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,066
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/156779
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lettered/pseuds/lettered
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John broke up with his girlfriend.  Sherlock doesn't comfort him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Anatomical Difference

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to pandarus for the Brit pick!

John didn’t mind that many people mistook Sherlock and him for a couple. Honestly.

Sometimes, though, there was a bit of difficulty about it. Namely whenever John got a girlfriend.

“You and Sherlock,” girlfriend would inevitably begin.

John would sigh. “Me and Sherlock.”

“You’re not . . . going out, are you?”

John would give her a look. Sometimes he took her hand, touched her face. “I’m going out with you.”

“But you used to go out,” girlfriend would insist.

That was when John dropped her hand. “Nope.”

“Why not?” The curiosity was killing her. “You’re not attracted to Sherlock?”

“I think Sherlock might be asexual,” John said, which was a very neat little evasion of the question he’d thought up all himself.

Mary frowned, something she could not work out; she was pondering a puzzle. She was nothing at all like Sherlock, for whom possibilities were playthings. “Maybe Sherlock is gay,” she said, after a while.

“What?” said John. “No.”

“Why not?” Once she lit on a theory, she liked it, unlike Sherlock, who was so certain of every theory. The other difference was that Sherlock was always right.

“Sherlock’s around men all the time.”

Mary stared. “So?”

“What?” John said impatiently. He was tired of this conversation. He was tired of Mary and he was tired of Sherlock, so tall, black hair, sharp slanted eyes and something fragile that always made people want to find out what Sherlock was, when the answer to the riddle was that Sherlock, who loved riddles so readily, was no riddle at all.

Mary rolled her eyes, saying, “Everyone Sherlock is around is a man because that’s the way things are. In case you haven’t noticed, it’s still a man’s world out there. Police detective and all that are mostly men. So are serial killers.”

“Sherlock likes serial killers,” John pointed out.

“Sexually?” Mary played innocent, and John made a noise of disgust.

“Look,” he said suddenly, after a while. “Why does it always have to be about how Sherlock gets off? Why can’t she ever be just what she is, just a girl, a woman; she loves her work—can you just, can you leave her alone? No one would keep on like this if she was a man.”

Mary looked down. “With the way you two are,” she said quietly, “some of us would.”

“Most of us wouldn’t,” John ranted on, and didn’t notice that he included himself. “Sherlock and I would just be partners. Roommates who are friends. Friends who work together. Maybe there would be the occasional joke about one or the other of us being a poof, but admit it: would I always have to deny Sherlock and I were shagging?”

Mary’s mouth was a small, unhappy line. “It’s a straight man’s world,” she corrected her earlier statement.

John didn’t know what she meant, and they left it at that. For the time being.

*

Sherlock was speaking of something else later when she pointed out, “People want to comfort themselves with an idea of normality.”

Men who were partners, roommates, friends did not have sex of course—that was considered normal. A man and woman who were partners, roommates, friends did have sex of course—that was considered normal.

“Right," John responded. "It’s not comforting at all that we’re just freaks.”

Sherlock sat at John’s laptop, transferring photos from her mobile, comparing them to a printout from yesterday. She had her digital tablet and her hair down, which meant business. For some reason there was also skype and a little house made out of toothpicks involved, and what he hoped was breakfast or ink smudged all the way up one arm. She did not indicate any change of subject at all when she said, “She didn’t deserve you,” and went back to slipping an craft knife between the toothpick logs.

John was surprised and strangely pleased that Sherlock knew about the break up, which was daft, since Sherlock always knew everything. Maybe he was pleased more because Sherlock had bothered to say she knew, instead of just ignoring it because it had nothing to do with toothpicks or the rusty smudges on her arm. Or maybe he just liked the implied compliment.

She’d already forgotten it, he knew. By next week she’d’ve completely forgotten Mary altogether, except that Sherlock remembered everything. Still, John thought it was nice she noticed.

Sherlock didn’t frown when she worked, even when she was concentrating. John had noticed that early on. Instead, there was a fervor there, a passion, something alight. She was more like someone religious in a church, someone involved in an ecstatic faith, than she was like someone working out a problem. But when she found the answer, it was not at all like finding God. There was no eureka, no shout of discovery or of awe. There was merely cool satisfaction, a knowing smile—as if she had found herself instead.

“Tweezers,” she announced suddenly, and John realized he’d been watching her the whole half-hour.

She held her hand up and back without looking up, instinctively knowing the direction from which he’d come, and knowing even better that he would.

By the time he put the tweezers in her hand, she was already grasping them and pulling them toward her; his hand brushed her black hair. When she had it down like this—spilling, a cascade, all around her, unwashed; he could see grease and split ends and the softness of it, the luxury of it, all the curls and roundness of it, her body—it was because she was too distracted to pull it back. He found that very impractical, as Sherlock rarely was.

“Doesn’t it get in your way?” he asked.

“You do,” she agreed. “Rubber band.”

“What’s this project, anyway?” he asked, wandering back, elastic pulling and releasing between his fingers.

“Chemistry, my dear.”

John stiffened, then perfunctorily put his hand out to give her the rubber band. He hadn’t had to hand her something that way, not after the tweezers—the mobile, the pen, the chopsticks, the whatever Sherlock asked for. Her hand was always held out, waiting for something. Some kind of acceptance, some kind of acknowledgement, a kind of handshake or clasping together that was not touch, but still meant they went hand in hand. She expected him to take it, that he would give, give in. That she could call him dear and he would think nothing of it.

She took it and in two swift movements, had her hair up in it. The band was rough and the bun was messy. Soon long locks were hanging in her face again. She would ask him for safety pins next, paper clips, to hold it back; she could ask him for his fingers to be her comb; when was the last time she had showered? She could ask him—

“Curry.”

John swallowed. “How much?”

“A pound and a half.”

“What on earth do you need that much curry for?” Now he was just frustrated.

“I do not know what you ordinarily use curry for,” Sherlock said, sweeping with a horse-hair brush her little red powders and a toothpick into a small brown envelope, “but I intend to eat mine. Are you coming?” Then she was done and looking at him expectantly, head at last raised, throat at last exposed, but not for long because she was sweeping up from there, into coat and scarf, reaching for his own coat and then hesitating, the first hesitation in so long. “You’re coming, aren’t you?”

John hesitated. Her hair was scattered every which way, curls on top of curls. “Maybe not,” he suggested.

“You’re hungry. You can’t live on coffee,” she pointed out.

“I had breakfast.”

“You had chips,” she corrected. “Last night you had three biscuits for dinner and before that you were eating from a vending machine. Are you sick?”

“No,” said John, and put on his jacket.

As they walked down the street to the little Madras restaurant around the corner, John broke down. “How’d you know about the vending machine?”

“Your jacket,” she reminded him. “I handed it to you before we came out.

“I’m not a messy eater,” he reminded her back.

“Your pocket.”

“Why would there be crumbs in there?” He thought about that, then added, “And I threw my wrapper away.”

“You had fifteen pence in your pocket.”

“Fifteen pence could mean anything,” he pointed out, and it made him feel better. This old game, going down the street to the Madras Pavilion, a pound and a half of curry, how could she find out from fifteen pence—he felt better. He wondered whether she had engineered it, and then had to remind himself that whatever she was thinking of, it was rarely anything to do with anyone else.

“You left without breakfast yesterday morning,” she began, in that lean, quick voice that husked, a former smoker. “In the courtyard of Mary’s flat there is a vending machine against which the teenage son of one resident—she used to be a pilot; they have a dog—leans against whenever he goes out to smoke. (She doesn’t approve of his habits.) There are always an inordinate number of butts by that machine; you had ash on one shoe.

“I also know the particular brand of chocolate bar you like to eat when no one is looking, that you will have become hungry waiting for her to return, that you fortify yourself with food; that particular vending machine carries that bar for eighty-five pence, and you are one pound shorter than you were yesterday morning.”

They went on walking, Sherlock with her satisfied, I’ve-found-God-it-is-I smile. John no longer felt happy.

She’d left so many cues for him in that—how had she known he’d had to wait so long for Mary, how did she know his predilection for Mars bars, one pound short—did she go through his wallet, when had she been to Mary’s flat? How did she even know he’d gone to make up with Mary? But all he asked was, “A pilot?”

“Yes,” but Sherlock was distracted. “You’re not going to turn into a wasting heroine, are you?”

She’d stopped in the road, was looking down at him, taller than he was, her face long and sharp, her expression stern. Her hair whipped and eddied about her face, almost completely escaped the rubber band.

“No,” he said, somehow feeling tired, even though it was only early afternoon. “I don’t intend to be the heroine.”

“Good. I need your help tracking down someone. He might have connections to the Indian food industry.”

John felt something inside twist. “I thought we were getting a pound and a half of curry.” He’d been envisioning plates and plates of bhajji and naan.

“You are. I’m going to talk to Ravi. Get the bhajji, if it makes you feel better. You’re no good if you’re moping.”

She walked on, and he just couldn’t help the fact that she knew about the bhajji, that she had found something to take his mind off everything, that she stood so erect and proud and uncaring that everyone around her wished she could be only a little less actual, a little less honest, a little less who she was and always would be.

He wished sometimes so hard it hurt, and then at times like these he was just as ferociously glad that she hid nothing from him at all. Even if it meant he had that much more to hide, she saw it all and it didn’t phase her. That was the very best of her; she saw who you were and went on being who she was, without ever the least desire to change for you, or for anything at all.

“The reason Sherlock can’t just ever be a woman,” Mary had said, her voice so sad, “is a man can never just be a man.”

Mary was right about John. He couldn’t just be a man, a man who didn’t notice her neck and spine and the straightness of her shoulders; he’d notice them regardless of who or what she was; he would always feel this, because Sherlock was Sherlock Holmes.

Mary was right about Sherlock, too, but not for the same reasons. Sherlock couldn’t just be a woman, because Sherlock was Sherlock Holmes before she was anything, and that would never change.


End file.
